Susan Granger’s review of “I Am Love” (Magnolia Pictures)
Chaos and confusion disrupts the luxurious, carefully ordered life of the Recchis, a wealthy, distinguished, upper-class Italian family when Emma (Tilda Swinton) decides to embark on a scandalous, passionate love affair with her son’s best friend, a talented chef.
As the film begins during the Christmas season in snow-covered Milan, Emma Ricchi (Swinton), a stylish Russian immigrant, has devoted her life to her husband, Tancredi (Pippo Delbono) and their three now-grown children. At a family gathering to celebrate his birthday, her ailing father-in-law (Gabriele Ferzetti), a textiles tycoon, announces that he is retiring and will turn over his company to his son Tancredi and grandson Edoardo/Edo (Flavio Parenti). Then, awhile later, Emma inadvertently discovers that her daughter Elisabetta (Alba Rohrwacher), who lives in London, is a lesbian, a fact that should be secret in Milan’s ultra-conservative patriarchy in the 1950s.
So when this genteel, repressed trophy wife meets young Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini) and visits him in Sanremo, seeing his grandfather’s land on which he plans to build his restaurant, she’s feeling lonely, uncertain and alienated, vulnerable to the emotions that overwhelm her.
“When I moved to Milan, I stopped being Russian,” Emma explains to her lover, who, along with ravishing her body has, symbolically, cut her hair short.
Easily classified as a sumptuous cinematic feast, taking its place alongside Ang Lee’s “Eat Drink Man Woman” and Pixar’s “Ratatouille,” the lush cuisine is sublime, particularly the glazed prawns. Indeed, Ms. Swinton has proclaims that particular scene as “prawnography” with Carlo Cracco of Cracco’s restaurant in Milan as an advisor.
Italian director/co-writer/producer Luca Guadagnino is obviously besotted by his leading lady and longtime muse. That’s an unintentional pun since the torrid sex scene consists primarily of close-ups of the lovers’ nude bodies that are intercut with shots of pollinating bees, courtesy of cinematographer Yorick Le Saux.
In Italian with English subtitles, on the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “I Am Love” is an exaggerated yet elegant, opulent, sensual 7, a leisurely-paced, European art-house melodrama that’s made its way into the Cineplex.
